Vending machines for dispensing canned or bottled beverages or other products have long been known. Early model vending machines released similarly sized bottles, one at a time, following the deposit of a required purchase amount. In order to withdraw the selected bottle from the vending machine, a purchaser was required to, for example, slide the bottle along a track until reaching a release point, at which time the bottle could be removed from the machine. While effective, differences in bottle design, size, and shape made it necessary to develop product-specific vending machines. However, over time, the packaging of beverages in cans gained in popularity. The standardization of product containers brought on through the use of beverage cans made vending simpler. Many vending machine designs employed serpentine tracks that increase storage capacity and improve the overall efficiency of the vending operation.
Presently, product containers are once again available in various different sizes and shapes. Also, specialty beverages, such as sports and energy drinks, flavored teas, fruit juices, milk and the like, are growing in popularity. Typically, these beverages are packaged in glass or plastic bottles that have unique shapes, which are associated with the particular product. Given the wide variety of container sizes, mechanisms for delivering a selected product to a consumer must be readily adaptable or capable of accommodating a large number of different products. At present, transport mechanisms that transition in multiple planes to deliver a selected product to a consumer are growing in popularity. Typically, the selected product is either retrieved from a shelf or allowed to pass into a carrier portion of the transport mechanism, whereupon the carrier is shifted towards a dispensing area.
Once at the dispensing area, the product must be discharged from the transport carrier. Various mechanisms have been employed to discharge a selected product from a transport carrier into a dispensing area. In one example, the product is simply run along a conveyor belt into the dispensing area. In another example, the selected product is gently placed in the dispensing area. In still another arrangement, the product is simply ejected from the transport carrier and allowed to fall within the vending machine cabinet into the dispensing area.
In many vending machines, the dispensing area is laterally offset from the product storage area. For example, the product storage area may be defined between left and right upstanding inner walls, and products are discharged through one of the walls into a laterally spaced compartment located below a validator unit. With this arrangement, the product storage area is necessarily reduced in its lateral dimension. Other vending machines simply drop products to a lower retrieval chamber that is accessible through a frontal zone of the vending machine. Although these known arrangements enable the full width of the vending machine to be used for product storage, considerable measures must be taken to assure adequate protection from product theft through the frontal zone.